


love, actually, is: the final frontier

by espressohno



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Fluff, Holidays, Humor, Multi, Romantic Comedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:55:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27992622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressohno/pseuds/espressohno
Summary: it's Love Actually, but it's on the Enterprise, and on a starship the 12 month calendar doesn't exist, and it's in the 23rd century so the holidays don't really look the same, but it's Love Actuallyensemble rom com fic with classic Chuhura pining, a ship I invented between Pavel and Ensign Syl (from st beyond), Hikaru and his husband in a loving marriage, Gaila/Scotty with an entirely new Gaila characterization which i also pulled out of nowhere, Spones because i think my own jokes are funny, background Spirk, and a McSpirk finale because i don't write enough of that shiphappy holidays
Relationships: Ben Sulu/Hikaru Sulu, Christine Chapel/Nyota Uhura, Gaila/Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy, James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock, James T. Kirk/Spock, Leonard "Bones" McCoy/Spock, Pavel Chekov/Original Character(s)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 39





	1. two steps away

**Author's Note:**

> i know i completely trashed this movie in another fic i wrote last year, but since then i've accidentally become a fan of love actually and it's because i accidentally became a colin firth fan so. i wrote this.

“You wanted to see me?”

“Yes.” Doctor McCoy turned around in his chair--from facing the blank wall behind his desk, apparently. “Sit down,” he said. 

Christine had no idea what this was going to be about. She didn’t get called into McCoy’s office, because if there was ever a problem in Medbay, with the nursing staff or a patient or anything else, she always showed up on her own before it got to that point. To be called into his office meant she had missed something. 

She didn’t  _ miss _ things. 

Christine sat on the edge of the empty chair next to his desk. She pushed her bangs away from her face. McCoy was watching her. 

“Chapel, how long have you been on the Enterprise?”

This was bad. This was really bad, because this was the sort of question that came before a long and relentless lecture. The kind of lecture she’d only overheard other people having to sit through. 

She cleared her throat. “Two years, seven months, six days, and--” she looked above McCoy’s head, at the clock on the wall, “--five hours. Just about.”

McCoy nodded, unfazed by the exactness of her answer. But then again, he spent enough time talking to Commander Spock to know that she could have been way more exact than that. 

He leaned forward, setting his elbows over his desk and lacing his fingers together. Christine was bracing herself for a lecture, still, but he didn’t look ready to blow his top. If anything, he looked careful with his next words--like it was Christine’s reaction that needed to be worried about. 

“And tell me,” he started, and took a too-long pause before asking, “how long have you been in love with Lieutenant Uhura?”

Christine felt all of the blood in her body rush up to her face at once, leaving her hands and feet freezing cold. She could hardly move, but managed to tilt her head down and stare at her knees. And clear her throat again. 

“Two years, seven months, six days, and thirty minutes,” she said.

-

Christine knew she was the favorite. Even before the rest of the Medical staff started throwing it around as a joke, and before McCoy started treating her better than he treated everyone else, glaring and snapping at her less and almost never raising his voice. The two of them had bonded pretty quickly since she came onto the Enterprise. They had a similar set of principles, and they respected each other--Christine liked his relentless pursuit for high standards, as suffocating as it could be, and she knew McCoy appreciated her very clear and immediate communication even though she was sometimes accused of being impolite (or a snitch). 

That being said, they didn’t talk about this kind of thing. Ever. The fact that McCoy had even noticed Christine’s crush on Nyota made her sweat just thinking about it for the next couple of days. She didn’t know he knew about that--she didn’t think anyone knew about that. Christine had left his office after that meeting terrified of the fact that she wasn’t as subtle as she thought. 

Oh god, what if Nyota knew, too?  
The extent of McCoy’s advice had been _why don’t you just tell her that you want to get married and have hundreds of babies?_ which was both unhelpful and sounded surprisingly graphic coming from the mouth of the same man who used the word _fuck_ like it was a punctuation mark. Overall the only thing that came out of their little meeting about Christine’s love life had been pure terror, which she now lived with almost daily, but especially on the days when she saw Nyota. 

They’d been something like friends for a while, but now it was all she could do to blurt out  _ hey Nyota  _ whenever she saw her and then pretend she had something to do and run away in the other direction. Nyota still smiled at her, like always, that sweet smile that made her eyes get brighter and her cheeks rounder and made Christine like, freak out a little bit. 

She didn’t know what her plan had been, before, if she’d even had one. Maybe she’d subconsciously resigned herself to the idea that she’d live out the rest of her life in love with Nyota without saying anything. She’d already made it through two and a half years like this, right? She may or may not have said something along those lines to McCoy, who had given her a look equivalent to  _ bless your heart,  _ and said nothing more. 

-

Christine was at a loss. She was at a loss, and she was getting cranky. It was just that time of year. 

There were no seasons on the ship, but for a season-accustomed species like Humans, there was always a point in each year on the Enterprise that started to feel like winter. People had less energy during those few weeks, and they bickered with each other more and the whole ship just felt on edge. Apparently they had started to pick up on this before Christine was on board, but it wasn’t until she pointed out this season as something of an  _ emotional winter _ that Captain Kirk decided that if his crew was experiencing winter, then they needed to celebrate like it was winter. 

Cue the introduction of the annual Enterprise Winter Solstice Party--held on the day when most inter-crew conflicts were reported three years in a row since they first set out. 

The funniest part was that it absolutely worked. Especially after the first year, the anticipation of this party put people in a better mood, and so did the aftermath. Christine boiled it down to Human nature. There was a reason Humans on Earth had been celebrating the coldest, darkest part of the year for thousands of years. It was the only way to get through. And the principle still seemed to apply on a starship with no seasons and the same amount of light every single day. 

So every year they covered the rec deck in blue and white decorations, snowflakes and garland and twinkling lights, and covered the tables in desserts, and candy, and drinks, and let everybody loose. 

Christine didn’t usually let loose too much, anyway, so it wasn’t strange for her to be standing at the edge of the party. It  _ was _ strange that the Captain had decided to leave the dance floor, where he was usually the star, to keep her company. 

“Not in the mood this year?” she asked him. 

“Just a little distracted tonight.”

He scanned the room while he talked, like he was looking for someone. Christine wondered who a person like Jim Kirk would have his eye out for.

“What do you think it says about Humans, that we always find time to dance?” he asked. 

Christine watched the dance floor, the crowd of her friends and coworkers dancing their stress away together under the blue and white lights. Even the non-Human crewmembers were a part of it, exchanging dance moves and inventing new ones. 

“It’s not just us, I think. I think all life dances.”

“If you can move, you can dance,” Nyota said, and Christine turned her head and saw her standing next to her. She was smiling, and watching the dance floor like they were, in her same uniform as always but with her hair down, framing her face. She belonged on the walls of museums, in every style and color palette. 

“And if you  _ can _ dance,” she continued, “why wouldn’t you?”

There was a moment when they looked at each other, and it must have been in between songs on the playlist because the music started to fade out, and Christine could see the twinkling lights shining in Nyota’s eyes and the way the energy of the room made her relax and smile wider and looser, in the line of her small shoulders and the way she held her head. 

It was Captain Kirk who cut in next and pulled Christine out of the moment so fast she nearly lost her balance. 

“Nurse Chapel, I think Lieutenant Uhura is asking you to dance,” he said quietly, leaning closer to her ear, but it must have been loud enough for Nyota to hear and nod in confirmation. “Here,” he said, “I’ll take that, you go.” And he pulled the drink out of her hand, and gestured his head towards the dance floor. 

Christine couldn’t say no-- _ how could she ever say no _ \--but she couldn’t seem to do much at all, least of all move her feet. Except Nyota grabbed her hand and that was more than enough to get her walking towards the dance floor. They ended up right in the middle, surrounded by people swaying to the music. 

Uncomfortably aware of herself and the fact that Nyota was also aware of her, Christine slowly started to move, bobbing her head and swaying her hips a little bit, but as soon as she did the music abruptly changed. 

To a love song. The kind of slow, sweet love song that makes someone sigh if they’re listening to it alone. 

But Christine wasn’t listening alone. So she did the bravest thing she could manage, and took a step closer to Nyota on the dance floor. And so did she, except she was braver, and placed her hand on Christine’s waist. 

That was all it took. This entire time they’d been only two steps away from each other. 

By the end of the song Nyota’s head was resting against the curve of Christine’s neck, and her hand that had started around her waist turned into an arm wrapped around the small of her back. Christine had spent years thinking about her relationship with Nyota, about all of the things that she wished would happen, but her mind had never landed on dancing. To be this close to her, to hold her in her arms and sway to the music like there was nobody else in the room--this is what Christine should have been dreaming about the whole time. 


	2. universal translators

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay so i tried my best with descriptions but look up Ensign Syl from beyond. she only had like two lines in the movie and they killed her off but she's imprinted on me, so i wrote her into this

Pavel knew Ensign Syl in passing. She worked down in the xenobiology labs (overworked, reportedly). They had met once when she first came on board, straight from the Academy after the rest of the ship had been on Earth for a shore leave, and they’d been seated in the same row on the shuttle. They met a second time when they were dealing with a disease outbreak on Tseron and she came to the bridge to tell the Captain about the cure they discovered in the lab. 

Somehow, although they’d never exchanged more than a hello, Pavel felt a little bit excited when they were paired up during an away mission. She was in charge of collecting life matter samples on the planet’s surface and Pavel was in charge of, well, carrying them. But he wanted to talk to her since she never seemed to go to any social events. Even the against-regulation Ensign parties--which were happening almost once a week at this point. What could he say, this was the hard part of the year when people got stir crazy. 

Syl never came around, though. He made it his goal during this away mission to talk her into it. 

“What do you do when you’re not working?” he asked, trailing behind her as she collected moss samples and insects. 

“I go back to my quarters.”

Her voice through the translator was soft and low, a little bit like the computer’s voice. 

“No hobbies? Don’t you socialize?”

She turned over her shoulder and gave him a confused look, narrowing her eyes, before finally smiling a little. “Are you worried about me?”

“I never see you anywhere. We have parties, you know.”

“I know.”

She turned back to her sample collecting. Pavel watched her work methodically, getting slides of everything in sight. Her species was one of the ones considered less attractive by Humans (meaning  _ less Human-looking _ ), but there was something about the way she looked that made Pavel want to stare a little bit. The appendages on the back of her head, that all folded towards the middle, they almost made it look like she had a crown of braids. He liked the harsh contours of her face and the dignified look they gave her. The strong line of her nose. 

Pavel realized he was staring when he saw that she’d been holding out a tray of samples, for god knows how long. He took it and slipped it into the organizer they’d brought along. 

“You never answered my question,” he said. 

Syl had that amused look on her face again as she turned around, but it all went slack with fear when she saw what was behind Pavel. 

“Get down,” she said, although she immediately grabbed his hand and started running instead. Pavel glanced over his shoulder as they ran and saw a mass of clouds moving towards them, like a dust storm, but with flashes of lightning all throughout. Electrical storm. And it looked like a bad one, like the kind of storm which could wipe out all of their tech at best, and electrocute them to death at worst. 

They took cover under an old tree, where the ground had hollowed out and the roots almost made a sort of roof. Following protocol in this sort of thing, they both busied themselves with ripping all tech and metal from their bodies, making a pile on the ground, far enough away that no sparks would hit them. 

They could hear the electrical storm approaching, the way it burned the leaves off of tree branches, and Pavel pressed himself against the cool, damp ground behind their backs. He saw Syl next to him, glancing upwards in fear, as if she needed to see the exact moment it came, and reached his hand to her shoulder and pulled her to press against the edge of their little cave, too. 

“It’s safer here,” he said, and she watched him with wide eyes, but didn’t seem to know what he’d just said. 

And then Pavel realized, just as the storm got close enough that he could feel his hair standing up from static. She’d taken off her universal translator. 

When the storm had finally passed, and they slowly released each other and crawled out from under the tree, they found all of their tech, translators included, in a charred pile. Pavel reached for his communicator, and if he had stopped to think about it for even one second longer he would have realized what would happen when he did. He nearly fell backwards from the shock that ran through his body. 

He was steadying himself against a tree when he finally caught his breath, looked up, and saw Syl staring at him in horror. 

“I’m fine,” he said, “My recommendation: don’t do that.”

She didn’t laugh, or relax at all, from Pavel’s words. Probably because she didn’t understand them without her translator. Pavel wanted to sigh and drop his face into his hands but he didn’t want to risk her misunderstanding that. 

“We should go back,” he said next. At this point he was just talking to himself. 

Except now Syl responded. Her language used a combination of vocal sounds, humming, and something that almost seemed like purring. Her voice went up at the end, and she clicked her tongue, and Pavel almost wondered if that had been a question. He blinked at her and tilted his head to the side, and finally she smiled. 

“Oh,” he said, “I get it. A taste of my own medicine.”

She spoke again, with that purring sound and low notes that were smooth enough to sound like singing, for Humans. She pointed at their bag of samples, still underneath the tree, and started walking towards it. 

“Right. Of course.”

Pavel followed her to pick it up, but she’d already beat him to it, and he stood up without thinking and immediately smashed his forehead against the tree root sticking out of the ground. 

She gasped. That was the same in every species’ language, apparently. 

“It’s fine, it’s fine.” He started waving his hand dismissively, even though the other one was holding his head to keep it upright while it throbbed. “This is nothing. I’m from Russia.”

Syl pointed at her head with her free hand. 

“Yeah, it’s fine. It’s getting better already.”

She spoke, then, clicking her tongue more, and set down the bag to gesture around her head with both hands. Now she was smiling, and holding her hands a few centimeters out from her head almost like she had a--

“Oh no,” Pavel said. He let go of his forehead and slid his hand backwards into his hair. The electrical storm had made it stand up, but he hadn’t stopped to think that it could have done this. Instead of the usual tight curls on the top of his head, the heat and static of the storm, and that shock he’d gotten from his communicator, had unwound them all and sent them straight out. It must have looked like cotton candy on top of his head. 

“Oh no,” he said again, and the look on his face must have been ridiculous enough for Syl to start laughing. 

He hadn’t heard her laugh before. It was surprisingly familiar. Not Human, but unmistakable, the way her body shook and her breath came out in little huffs of air and sound. She covered her mouth with her hand. 

“Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Laugh at the funny man with the funny hair.”

She kept giggling, her eyes going half closed, and Pavel couldn’t even feel embarrassed anymore. He stood there and bounced his hand against the surface of his hair, which only made her laugh more, and then took a step closer. He pointed at her hand and his head, back and forth. 

“Try it, it feels cool.”

It took a bit more gesturing for her to realize, and she nodded. She may have needed the translator to speak to Humans, but she’d spent long enough on the ship that hand gestures seemed to get them pretty far. She slowly reached out her hand, which had those same contours as the rest of her body, white and thin like veins, and touched the bouncy surface of Pavel’s hair with her fingertips. 

He watched her face as she gradually got braver, and pressed her whole palm against it to watch it spring back into place again. She smiled out of wonder. Pavel could only guess that this was her first experience with Human hair. He wondered if she understood why the storm had made it get so crazy. Maybe when they were back on the ship he’d find her again to put words to the exchange happening right now. 

She pulled her hand away, and Pavel was going to suggest again (with hand gestures this time) a return to the checkpoint, when she started making the same gestures that he had a minute ago. Pointing at Pavel’s hands and then at the crown of appendages wrapped around her head. 

“Oh,” he said. “Damn.”

This somehow felt like a bigger deal, but he reached forward until he could feel them against the tips of his fingers, unsure of how sensitive they’d be, of what sort of touch was appropriate. They felt warm and smooth like skin, and the joints where they bent weren’t as hard as he’d expected. He felt himself making the same awestruck sort of face that he’d seen Syl make. 

“Wow.”

She purred in response, and when he pulled his hand away she tilted her head and ran her own knuckles against them, probably saying something about her species that Pavel wished he understood. 

“We need to talk, when we get back to the ship. You can’t keep hiding in the lab.”

Syl picked up the bag of samples. She spoke louder, gesturing in the direction they came from. 

“Back to the ship?” he asked, and immediately realized that she still wasn’t going to answer. “Okay, back to the ship.”

“Did you know,” he said as they walked, “that there are more than 100 languages spoken in the territory of Russia?”

She said something in response that he couldn’t even guess. But he imagined an answer, and kept going. People usually found their way out of the conversation when he brought up his homeland, and he would admit that maybe he brought it up more often than necessary, but it was nice to feel like he was being listened to. 

“Well, I’ll tell you. Russia is not just full of people who look like me, you know...”

-

He almost felt disappointed when they made it back to the checkpoint and met up with someone who still had a functioning communicator to call the transporter room, because it meant that their game of trying to talk to each other in their own languages was over. The two of them had started to get good at it. Pavel hoped that at least they’d have some sort of friendship after this, but even though Syl smiled at him in the transporter room, after she left for the lab he didn’t see her again for days. 

Not until the Winter Solstice Party. He had shown up with his usual plan to get drunk--and then see how many other people he could get drunk. He’d only taken one sip before he saw her, just a glimpse between the crowd. 

Pavel followed it, pushing through people until he found her in the corner with some other science officers, still in her blues with a universal translator clipped on the neck of her uniform again. 

“I thought you didn’t come to parties,” he said, and when she saw him her eyes lit up. Then she smiled. 

“This one sounded okay.”

Pavel couldn’t think of what to say next. Finally, standing in front of Syl and knowing that she’d understand him perfectly, and that he’d understand her, was harder than making silly gestures and throwing words out knowing less than half of them would stick. Based on her still wide-eyed expression, even though she’d moved closer to him since he showed up, Syl was probably thinking the same thing. 

Finally she pointed at his head. “You fixed it.”

“Oh.” Pavel’s hand--the one not holding a glass of vodka--flew up to the top of his head, and he remembered the whole static situation from last time. Scotty had laughed so hard at him in the transporter room he’d had to sit down, actually. 

“Ha, yes. It’s back to normal now.”

“That’s too bad, I liked it.”

“Well, I will electrocute myself again, if you want, but I’ll do this only for you.”

Syl stared at him. Her friends took that line as a cue to leave, casting excited glances in their direction, and then they were alone in the corner. 

She still didn’t say anything. Pavel almost wondered if she knew what he had been trying to say, if this was somehow the first time an awkward Human had tried to flirt with her (which didn’t seem possible, did nobody else see how incredible she looked?). He cleared his throat, and then took a sip of his vodka for good measure. 

“What is that?”

“This?” Pavel wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “It’s vodka. Best drink in the world.”

She tilted her head to the side. 

“Try it,” he said without thinking, and also shoved the glass into her hands without thinking. 

As cautiously as she’d touched his wild head of hair, like she might be doing it wrong, Syl lifted the glass to her lips. 

And choked as soon as she tasted it. She waved her hand in front of her face and squeezed her eyes shut, and shook her head back and forth, like any of those things would help get the taste of vodka out of her mouth. She started coughing, realized Pavel had been watching her the whole time, and shook her head again.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry, but that’s the worst thing I’ve ever tasted.”

Her eyes looked apologetic but Pavel just burst out laughing. He’d already made half of the people on this ship try his vodka, but this was the best--and maybe cutest--reaction he’d gotten yet. It was a shame that Syl looked so certain she was offending him, even as she pushed the glass back into his hands. 

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

“Will you go on a date with me?” he blurted out. 

She stared up at him with wide eyes, teary from choking on vodka, and almost looked like she was about to ask  _ what? _

“A date,” Pavel specified, as if it needed specification. 

“With me.”

And Pavel was certain that if he had to spend one more second with that question hanging in the air while she looked at him like that he would slam his head against the wall. Then finally she opened her mouth to speak, didn’t say a single word, and started nodding her head yes instead. 

“Does that mean yes?”

“Okay. That would be nice. Yes.”

Pavel couldn’t stop himself from grinning. He may or may not have shot his fist up in the air triumphantly. He couldn’t remember, because a few seconds after she said _ Yes, _ Syl leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. Maybe that was universal too, or maybe she’d learned it on the ship. Pavel was willing to find out. 


	3. long-distance comms

He couldn’t be late, this time. He really, really couldn’t be late. 

The whole point of moving Ben and Demora to Yorktown was that he’d have less excuses not to make it home to them. It was easier to get to Yorktown. Even if the Enterprise didn’t stop there Hikaru could jump on nearly half of all other Federation ships, especially the cargo ones, and they’d probably be on their way to Yorktown. 

It only took about six months before Hikaru found himself saying the same things he used to say when plans to visit them on Earth would be canceled. And it sucked because he didn’t  _ want _ to do this. He didn’t want to keep being the one who said no, but ship life was like that. There was always something at the last minute that had to come first, especially because he was in the bridge crew. He’d even thought about requesting a transfer to a different ship, one that didn’t get all the high-priority missions that made it hard to maintain relationships, or becoming a cargo pilot which would only have him out for a few weeks at a time, tops, or, for god’s sake, getting a job on Yorktown. There were plenty of pilots who helped with docking or public transportation. 

In the end, Ben was the one who always talked him out of that. But Ben wasn’t here at this stupid party, this party that would have put them ahead of schedule in their mission if they skipped it for once. Even if Hikaru could have skipped it by himself, and piloted the ship for them while they all drank and danced and flirted with each other and had fun. 

“You look like you’re in a good mood.”

“I don’t want to talk right now,” Hikaru said. He and Doctor McCoy never talked anyway, unless they were collaborating for some sort of mission, or unless Hikaru was literally on a biobed. Hikaru hardly even wanted to be here. The last thing he wanted was to make a new friend. 

“Well, clearly. But it’s my job to care about my crew’s wellbeing, according to Jim, and you look about as miserable as a rooster in an empty henhouse.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

McCoy shrugged at him, like he really didn’t give a shit if Hikaru understood his southernisms or not. He took a sip of his drink and, for some reason, didn’t leave the conversation. “So,” he said, “tell me what ails you.”

Hikaru sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose for a second. 

“I just don’t want to be at this stupid party when our next mission is bound to run over. It’ll be the third time I’ve had to postpone going back to see my family.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve already made up your mind that the worst case scenario is happening.”

“Worst case scenario would be that I die in the next mission,” Hikaru said, and then, “wait, you’re one to talk about calling someone a pessimist.”

“Guilty.” McCoy held his hands up in surrender. He still did not leave. “So it’s about your family.”

“Yes it’s about my family.”

“You’re thinking of getting a different job, aren’t you.”

Hikaru looked down at his shoes, let out a long exhale, and nodded. “Yeah.”

“Listen, I’m not gonna try to talk you out of it,” McCoy said, before apparently doing that exact thing. “But do you actually want a different job? Or are you just making sure you’re always considering it so they know how guilty you feel.”

He thought about that for a second, and then looked up, and realized that as much as he didn’t want to admit it, McCoy knew almost exactly how he felt. The man had a daughter, on Earth, for fuck’s sake. He might be the  _ only  _ person who knew how Hikaru felt. 

“I don’t know, maybe you’re better at this than me.”

“No I handled it about as poorly then as you are now,” McCoy said. He nodded his head like he was saying something wise. 

“So what did you do?”

“Well eventually someone asked me the same question I just asked you. If I actually didn’t like what I was doing with my life or if I was doubting everything because I felt like I was supposed to, so I had proof that I felt bad for going far away.”

“It’s not just that I feel guilty. It feels like I’m disappointing them constantly by not being there,” Hikaru said, and he had no idea how he got here, opening up all of his emotional baggage to this man who he was definitely not friends with before a few minutes ago. Here they were, standing at the edge of a shipwide party, with the changing dance floor lights painting blue and white across their faces every other second. Hikaru saw groups of people laughing in his peripheral vision, and he was positive that McCoy did have actual friends who were at this party, like Kirk and Spock and Nurse Chapel and Scotty, and for some reason he stayed to talk to the sad bastard in the corner. 

McCoy pursed his lips at that  _ disappointing them constantly  _ comment, nodding his head not like he agreed, but like he was trying to figure out exactly how best to refute it. It was something Ben had already refuted. Multiple times, in fact. But Hikaru still felt it. 

“Do they look disappointed when you get off the shuttle and they see you?”

“No of course not.”

“Do they stand there and say you’re a fucking piece of shit for not taking enough breaks from being on a long-haul exploratory mission on the Enterprise?”

“Demora’s seven years old.”

“Answer the question.”

“No they don’t,” Hikaru sighed, “But they could be--”

“Feeling it constantly and not telling you about it and hoping you do something anyway?” McCoy finished his sentence. Unfortunately he did a pretty good job finishing that sentence. When Hikaru voiced his feelings out loud he already felt like he was being a little dramatic, but when they came out of McCoy’s mouth, dry and flat, he realized how idiotic they actually were. 

“Yeah, no, I think they’d let you know. Seven year olds don’t perform emotional labor.”

Hikaru breathed out a laugh. No, they sure didn’t. 

“And I’m sure you give your guy ample chances to tell you if he’s sitting in Yorktown in seething resentment waiting for you to change jobs. It sounds like he hasn’t taken any of them if you’re standing here putting words in his mouth.”

McCoy lifted his drink up to his mouth, like he was satisfied with his sage advice, and then paused, and added, “We don’t give enough credit to the people we leave behind.”

That was the last thing McCoy said, before he heard a crash somewhere that sounded like multiple drink glasses shattering and his head turned so fast to find the origin of the accident that it looked like it hurt, and then he was gone. Hikaru stood there for a little while, just thinking about what he’d said. 

Was he not giving Ben enough credit?

He realized that in his head saw everyone he left behind when he chose this life--his family in San Francisco, Ben, and then Ben and Demora--as these poor, abandoned people in the wake of the Enterprise. Left alone and confused, wondering when he’d be back. And he realized that McCoy was right, he wasn’t giving them enough credit. They were all living in the same time, a time with starships and space travel and long-distance comms. Demora probably understood as well as Hikaru did that this wasn’t a career that would have him home all the time. 

And McCoy was also right that the two of them never looked disappointed when he stepped off of the shuttle to see them again. 

Hikaru sighed at himself, and his own dramatic stupidity, rubbed his eyes with his hands, and pulled out his communicator. Ben had sent him a message. 

_ You better get wasted enough at this Winter Solstice party that I see videos of you doing the twist on the Federation channel tomorrow _ , he said, and the text made Hikaru laugh. For the first time since he arrived on the rec deck he looked up, at the people around him, and the dance floor actually looked pretty fun. 

_ Not on your life _ , he wrote back,  _ my twist is way too dynamic to be captured on video. It must be witnessed in person ONLY _

He sent the message, felt himself smiling down at his communicator, at this tiny machine that held so many of his interactions with his husband. Maybe this wasn’t such a terrible way to live, after all, if one set of messages could make him feel like this. 

He sent another message. 

_ I love you _ , it said,  _ feel free to request twist lessons for my next Yorktown stop, your form could use some work.  _

And later, when he wandered back to his quarters after the party feeling tired and almost happy, he checked his messages on his computer to see that Ben responded with:

_ Insult my twist one more time and there will be no “next Yorktown stop” _ . 

McCoy was definitely right. He didn’t give the man enough credit. 


	4. starfleet regulations be damned

“Did it happen more than once?”

“No!” Gaila’s voice was too loud, and she had to look around the mess and make sure nobody was listening before she continued. “It was only one time. It was just a really good one time.”

“So, what,” Nyota asked, “I don’t get what you’re asking me.”

Gaila pushed her wild hair away from her face, held her forehead between her hands and looked down at the table. As if she had to think any more about this than she already had for the past three days. People said things about her back at the Academy, they threw around stereotypes because of how she dressed and the makeup she wore and most importantly because of which planet she came from. They all assumed she was walking around with the world’s longest list of one-night stands, and she’d even overheard that Jim Kirk was on that list (which was news to  _ her _ ), but in reality Gaila was extremely careful with men, and terrible at love. And Nyota was her best friend and had to hear about all of it, which meant she knew she hadn’t had sex since Kevin Riley broke her heart into a million pieces during their first year on the Enterprise. 

“It’s not like I’m in love with him already, it just--happened.”

“Okay.” Nyota pushed food around on her plate, building a perfect forkful which meant she was about to ask Gaila for the whole story. 

“How did it happen.”

“Well. I was on Gamma shift and everyone in the lower deck had gone off to the mess because there wasn’t anything to do for a while, and he came around looking for someone to help him because there was a panel loose on one of the cylinders of the warp core.”

Nyota raised an eyebrow at her. “He asked you to help tighten a panel on the warp core cylinders?” she asked with a very clearly suggestive tone in her voice. Gaila rolled her eyes. 

“Shut up. So I went with him and I went ahead and volunteered to sit on the pulley and go up there and be the one that tightened the bolts, because I have good balance with that sort of thing. And we were talking the whole time I was tightening the panel, just about regular stuff like, the ship obviously, and about the party next week, and he asked me if I was going with anyone and I thought that was funny because everyone was going to the party, I’d never heard of anyone going  _ with _ anyone else.”

“Gaila--”

“There’s more. So I finished tightening the panel, and saw that the one above it was a little bit loose, not loose enough that it was about to fall off like the other one, but it would’ve gotten there eventually so I tightened that one too. And then when he lowered the pulley to bring me back down I got my feet on the floor and suddenly it was so tense between us. Like,  _ really  _ tense, you know what I mean?”

Nyota’s chin was resting on her hand at this point. “Yeah I know what you mean.”

“But anyway we detached the pulley system from the warp core and put it away in the equipment closet, and we were still just talking so I followed him back to his office, and he asked me if I wanted a drink and I said _ I’m still on shift _ and he said  _ so are your coworkers who left to go to the mess and haven’t come back thirty minutes later  _ and so I said  _ okay I’ll have a drink _ .”

“You had a drink in his office?” Nyota’s suggestive tone was back.

“Just a little one, and I asked him if he was going with anyone to the party and he said no, and for some reason started talking about how he was terrible at dating and couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a date. And I don’t know why I did this but after he shared that he was bad at dating--”

“Tell me you did not--”

“Well I felt like I was supposed to share something so I told him about Kevin and me.”

“Gaila….” Her eyebrows drew together in concern. “I thought you were--”

“I _ am  _ over it. I didn’t even tell him the whole story, just a summary, but he got so mad and said he was going to make the transporter scramble his cells just a few seconds longer than usual the next chance he got--that was a joke I swear--but I started laughing and he asked me how something like that could have even happened to me. And I don’t know, we were both just talking about our love lives and that tension was still there since he’d lowered the pulley down and held his hand out when I stepped off.”

“He held your hand?”

“Just for a second! Wait, where was I.” Gaila looked down at the table. Her breakfast was definitely cold by now. 

“You were talking about love and it was tense.”

“Oh yeah.” She had to prepare herself a little bit for the next part. Talking about tightening the panel on the warp core cylinder had been easy, but that was because it wasn’t important to the actual story. “So then he said--well it was something like--he said that if he had a chance with me he would never do something so stupid.”

Nyota’s eyes were getting progressively wider. These things never happened to Gaila--well, not since Kevin Riley, but for good reason Nyota hadn’t been excited to hear about Kevin Riley in years.

“And what did you say,” she asked.

“I said,  _ I don’t think you would either _ .”

“Oh my god,” Nyota said.

“I don’t even know if I remember what we said next but maybe we were trying to compliment each other or something, I just know that I ended up kissing him-- _ I did that _ , it was me who started the kiss--”

“Oh my _ god! _ ”

“And he has this couch in his office that has like an orange-red fabric and it’s really nice because I think he sleeps in there a lot, and we moved there because it was more comfortable, and we just--”

“Oh my god,” Nyota whispered. This time she was the one who looked around the mess, but there weren’t any eavesdroppers, just sleepy crewmembers eating before beta shift. Gaila bit at her lower lip. 

“I don’t know, how much detail do you want?”

“Well, you said it was really good.”

She nodded, and felt her face heating up and felt grateful that Orions didn’t blush so obviously like Humans did. “It was--I mean, you know how guys always just think that because of my species I just automatically like everything and have no preferences?”

Nyota nodded. Gaila knew she knew, because she’d complained about it every time she slept with someone, and every time she even thought about sleeping with someone. 

“It wasn’t like that at all he...he cared about figuring out what I liked and kept asking me questions about what felt good and it was like…” Gaila lowered her voice even more, and leaned forward over the table. Nyota mirrored her. “It was like having sex for the first time, honestly. I didn’t know it was possible for someone to pay so much attention to my body.”

Nyota grinned, then. Gaila didn’t blame her, she’d had to stop herself from walking around with a goofy smile on her face ever since it happened, Until--

“I just don’t know what changed, because he was so awkward about it yesterday. He couldn’t even really look at me.”

“Oh no.” Her face fell. Gaila nodded, slowly. 

“I don’t know what to do.”

Nyota thought about it for a second. She wasn’t exactly qualified to give advice on this, considering her and Christine were walking in circles around each other and had been for the past two years, but Gaila couldn’t go to anyone else about this. Especially because he was, technically, her boss and this was, theoretically, kind of against Starfleet regulations. Starfleet regulations be damned, though, they were out in uncharted space and the man had kissed her belly, for fuck’s sake. 

“Well you said that he told you he was bad at dating, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe he just doesn’t know how to tell you that he’s interested in you. I mean, it sounds like he’s already made it pretty clear.”

Very clear. Or so Gaila had thought, until she’d showed up to work the next day and he immediately turned red when he saw her and pretended he had something to do in one of the jefferies tubes. 

“Should I just ask him if he’s interested in me or not?”

“I think you should ask him on a date.”

Gaila stared at her. “Are you sure?”

“Gaila, if this really was some of the best sex of your life, I think it’s worth a shot.”

Gaila spent the rest of their breakfast hour eating her (now cold) breakfast and thought about it, and then thought about it some more. And then she spent almost all of beta shift thinking about it. She showed up to Nyota’s quarters that night after dinner. 

As soon as she buzzed her inside, Gaila said, 

“If I do this you have to do it too.”

“Do what?” Nyota was in her pajamas with her hair down. It reminded Gaila of when they used to live together. 

“If I ask him on a date, you have to tell Christine you’re in love with her.”

Nyota pretended she wasn’t embarrassed by that, in the way she always did, by trying to laugh it off and look away even as her face got all flushed. 

“And you should wear your hair down like that when you do it,” Gaila said, and promptly left. 

-

Gaila hadn’t asked anyone on a date since the Academy, and back then she wasn’t even particularly good at it. The only thing she was good at was rejecting men who just saw her species and nothing else, and she could always tell when that was the case. They never seemed to care, when they came up to try to flirt. Half of the time they wouldn’t ask for her name. 

Her default was to reject men, which made it difficult to even know if someone was genuinely interested, because she was always on her guard for creeps. Still, she racked her brain all night and couldn’t figure out if she actually had been asked out or not, three days ago. Sure, they’d had sex, but  _ was he interested in her _ ? Like  _ actually? _

He wasn’t in his office when Gaila showed up to her shift the next day. She should’ve checked in with her team, but started looking around for him instead. 

Of all places, she found him in the hangar deck, on his knees with half of his body inside the wall where he’d removed the paneling. This seemed like a bad time. Except Gaila was bad at this to begin with, and she marched all the way down here and she wasn’t going to leave without just getting it over with. 

“Scotty?”

“Who is it?” he asked back, as if she’d knocked on the door. She could barely hear him down there and figured it must be the same on his side of things, so she knelt down next to the open panel. 

“I wanted to ask you something,” she said, raising her voice a little. Other than a couple blue shirts standing around one of the smaller shuttles, on the other end of the deck, they were alone in here. But she still felt her face heating up, like she was being stared at. 

“What do you need?”

Gaila wiped her hands on the edge of her uniform dress. They were sweating. 

“Well I just--”

“I’m sorry, I’ve got a hand on one of the wires keeping the gravity system working in here and I need to tighten the bolt on the pressure system, do you think you could come in here and give me a hand?”

“Yeah, of course, okay.” Without a second thought Gaila scooted closer on the floor, where he’d made room, and squeezed her upper body into the wall. There was more space inside than she would have thought, but still. She crawled in next to Scotty and realized she hadn’t answered his first question, and he didn’t know it was her he was talking to until she was pressed against him. 

“Oh, Gaila, is that you?”

The inevitable awkward moment after that was saved by the fact that Scotty really did need someone to hold the wire. 

“Which one should I--”

“It’s this one, here. Just keep it in that position until I can tie it up again.” 

“No problem.”

Gaila carefully replaced Scotty’s hand with hers, and there was that brief touch between them that reminded her of when he’d helped her off the pulley system, and when he’d cradled the back of her head in his hand to make sure she didn’t hit it too hard on the armrest of his orange couch. 

She swallowed hard, and watched him tighten the bolt. 

“What is it you wanted to ask me?” Inside the wall with him she could hear him perfectly, neither of them needed to shout, but she couldn’t turn her head to look at him. She could only stare straight ahead at her hand and the gravity wire and the bolt on the pressure system and Scotty’s hand with a wrench. “I’m sorry for interrupting you,” he said.

“Oh, it’s just,” Gaila cleared her throat. She had to get this over with. This was maybe the worst position for her to be rejected in, once she did get it all out. Although, to be honest, it couldn’t get worse than Kevin Riley. She’d been cheated on, first, and then dumped on the bridge in front of everyone, including the person he was cheating on her with, and then she’d had to go back into his quarters and take down the roomful of anniversary decorations she’d snuck in to set up that morning, and when she was doing that Kevin came back with the new love of his life, and both of them walked in on her crying and tearing down streamers from the ceiling and blasting Dolly Parton on the computer. Actually, Gaila was surprised Scotty had never heard about that. 

“I wanted to ask you--”

“Sorry, can you get the handkerchief out of my pocket, I’ve got grease going everywhere.”

He did. He’d greased the bolt too much and now it was all over his hands, shining in the blinking red safety lights that lined the inside of the wall. 

Gaila was able to reach her free hand back where she was pretty sure his pocket was. 

Evidently, not sure enough, but she couldn’t turn her head, and she couldn’t put the wire down and pull herself all the way out, so she had no choice but to,

“Sorry. Is it--okay I think I found it--no sorry that’s your--

“To the left.”

“Let me just--”

“You’ve nearly got it,” he said, voice a little strained, “There you go, should be in there.”

“I feel like I should go to the brig for this.”

Scotty laughed. Gaila liked the way it sounded, the way it echoed around them. Her stomach fluttered a little bit. She pulled the handkerchief out and brought it back into the wall, where his hands were still slipping with a wrench between them. 

“Thanks. So what did you want to ask me?”

Gaila wanted to groan. She felt almost certain that if she started her question again it would somehow get interrupted  _ again _ . But she tried anyway. Blurted it out, more like. It hardly even sounded romantic. 

“Would you go out with me?”

It went completely silent inside their little piece of the wall of the hangar deck. Even the low hum of the engine around them seemed to quiet down. It felt tense, like before when she’d come down from repairing the warp core cylinder. Gaila tried harder to turn her head, and managed, just enough, to see Scotty also craning his head to the side. Both of them still very much occupied, but he was staring at her in shock and disbelief and maybe a little bit of joy, like she’d just told him the secret to the universe, or given him the Enterprise, or--

asked him out on a date. 

“Really?”

Gaila nodded once. Even though she’d felt safer looking away from him when she first asked, now she found she didn’t want to look away. The awe in his face--was she really that special?--it almost made her feel good. 

“Remember when you said you wouldn’t do anything stupid if you had a chance with me?”

That made his cheeks turn red on the edges. But he said, “Yeah.”

“Do you want a chance?”

“Christ,” Scotty said, “Yes. Absolutely.” He looked like he wanted to move, to do something, and stopped. “Why did you have to ask me in here?”

“This is where I found you.”

Scotty groaned and turned back to the bolt. “Well what am I supposed to do now that you’ve told me I could kiss you again?” he asked. 

“Tighten the bolt already.”

“I’m tightening, I’m tightening!”

“And then tie up this wire so I can get out.”

“God, I love it when you boss me around.”

Gaila had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling like an idiot. But her entire body was warm and buzzing and she could hardly even stay still at all, let alone stay still enough to hold on to that stupid wire to keep the gravity system working in the hangar deck. All she could think about was the moment when they’d both crawl out from inside the wall and secure the panel back on, and he’d wipe the grease from his hands but they’d still leave stains on her uniform when he grabbed her waist and pulled her closer and they’d finally kiss each other again like Gaila had been thinking about all morning, regulations and work hours and a potential audience of science officers be damned. 

And that was exactly what happened next. 


	5. this means war

The comms started because Spock had a funny habit of checking Leonard’s CMO logs every so often and sending corrections on details that weren’t true or things left out. Which pissed Leonard off, supremely. And then the corrections were coming in almost daily. So he did what any sane person would do, and retaliated. 

**Leonard H. McCoy commented on** **_First Officer’s Log, Stardate 6810.96_ ** **, timestamp 13:09:**

That was a run-on sentence. 

**Leonard H. McCoy commented on** **_First Officer’s Log, Stardate 6810.96_ ** **, timestamp 15:40:**

Did you seriously think that was worth including in your first officer’s log? What you and Jim ate for dinner afterwards?

**Leonard H. McCoy commented on** **_First Officer’s Log, Stardate 6810.96_ ** **, timestamp 18:21:**

Now that’s not even correct. It took three doses of the vaccine on each of the away team and one emergency blood transfusion. I did not simply “distribute a vaccine”. Although I appreciate the use of the term “life saving”. In your last three logs you just describe my work as “necessary”.

In his defense, Leonard put up with Spock’s comments for way longer than Spock put up with his. Because he was god damn patient and level-headed, unlike Spock. He didn’t even finish putting his comments on the latest First Officer’s log (which was almost 30 minutes long, by the way) when Spock comm’ed him privately. 

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** Do you find this to be a satisfying use of your free time?

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Do you?

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** Your comments are unnecessary and they will only harm my credibility with the Federation if you persist. 

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** You are such a hypocrite. 

-

Spock had a very impressive case of cognitive dissonance. Maybe the most prolific one Leonard had ever seen in his career. Because after Leonard agreed to stop making comments on his logs, assuming that they had reached an understanding and that Spock knew what the word  _ hypocrite _ meant, Leonard still got a notification a few days later. 

**S’chn T’gai Spock commented on** **_Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 6832.6_ ** **, timestamp 09:05:**

Starbase 17 was 4 lightyears away from our current position at the time, not “down the road”. Space does not contain roads.

And this meant war. 

**-**

**Leonard H. McCoy commented on** **_First Officer’s Log, Stardate 6847.03_ ** **, timestamp 14:51:**

Actually the reason you took off from your shift that day was because you pulled a muscle doing yoga, not because of an illness. And the man who fixed it (me) deserves some credit. 

-

**S’chn T’gai Spock commented on** **_Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 6868.68_ ** **, timestamp 06:34:**

You give no explanation as to why Nurse Chapel left her shift early this day. 

-

**Leonard H. McCoy commented on** **_First Officer’s Log, Stardate 6883.11_ ** **, timestamp 31:09:**

You can just say that you’re in love with Jim. We all know it. 

-

**S’chn T’gai Spock commented on** **_Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 6897.54_ ** **, timestamp 04:11:**

Doctor McCoy’s logs have become shorter in duration. Anyone who wishes to investigate this discrepancy need only compare the time of his submission of each log with the timestamps of the comments he has been leaving on my own. 

**S’chn T’gai Spock commented on** **_Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 6897.54_ ** **, timestamp 06:39:**

“Irregardless” is not a word. 

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Oh for christ’s sake

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Can’t you leave it alone?

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** Can’t you?

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Twelve years old? Is that how old you are?

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** I fail to see the connection you are attempting to make.

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Just leave it be. Nobody cares about the tiny details. I’ll stop if you stop

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** But be warned if you don’t cut it out: I can and will play dirtier

-

Spock left two more comments on his log from that day. Leonard had no other choice. He would corroborate that he had no other choice. 

**NOTIFICATION FOR COMMANDER S'CHN T’GAI SPOCK: CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER HAS ISSUED A MANDATORY FULL ROUND MEDICAL CHECK UP. PLEASE BE PRESENT IN THE MEDICAL BAY TOMORROW AT 0900 HOURS.**

-

Spock showed up to Medbay the next morning looking equal parts regretful and hostile. To his credit he submitted to the entire check up, but he didn’t even feign ignorance as to why he was there. Finally when Leonard sent out his assistant for that day, one of the junior nurses who specialized in Vulcan physiology, and they were alone at Spock’s biobed, he said, 

“I propose that we call a truce.”

“Oh, do you now?” Leonard asked, running his close-range tricorder over Spock’s wrist. The muscles and nerves there were strained, probably from overuse of his hands for the sort of meticulous, detailed work he did in his lab. He was careful not to touch Spock’s hands, he knew about that kind of thing. 

He bent Spock’s wrist backwards just a bit; it hardly moved from how tense it was. When he looked up at Spock again he was lying there on the biobed, eyebrows starting to draw inwards in discomfort. 

“I will admit,” he said, strained, “that my actions have been unprofessional.”

“And?”

Spock glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. 

“It seems like there was an  _ and _ at the end of that.”

“There was not.”

“Alright,” Leonard said, “Give me the other wrist.”

The other one was about the same. 

“Man, what the hell are you doing with these?”

“I’m building a microchip.”

“You know we have machines on this ship that will do that for you.”

“It needs to be precise.”

“More precise than a machine?”

Spock was a stubborn bastard. They were the same in that respect. Leonard was the kind of man who refused almost all kinds of new medical tech designed to replace a real, breathing doctor, no matter how many people got on him about accuracy and margin of error and all that shit. It just wasn’t right in his mind. The thought that Spock was the same when it came to his own scientific work was somehow bothersome and endearing all at once. 

So he decided to do something nice. He took one of Spock’s wrists and pressed into the knot of tension below Spock’s thumb. 

“You gotta tell me if this gets inappropriate.”

“Trust me. I will.”

The longer Leonard held his thumb against Spock’s wrist, the more he slowly started to relax, in his face, in the line of his shoulders. His breaths that started off short and heavy became longer. 

“Do I appear to be in love with Jim?”

Oh good god. Had Leonard accidentally pressed into some sort of magic button that made Spock open up to him?

“ _ Appear to be _ implies that you might not actually be in love with him. You don’t appear to be anything.”

Spock raised his eyebrows in the way that he did when a Human (usually Leonard) was right and he didn’t want to admit it out loud. He stared straight ahead. “Astute.”

“I know I am.”

He took the pressure off from Spock’s wrist, which made him nearly sigh on his next exhale, and moved to the other one. 

“The two of you were intimate,” Spock said.  _ Was he jealous?  _ The thought made Leonard’s face feel warm and he had to scowl against it. 

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yet you still have feelings for him.”

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Leonard griped. His thumb against the knot of tension on Spock’s wrist remained steady but his other hand, down by his side, itched to ball itself into a fist. Who the hell did Spock think he was, to walk in here and--

“Wait, is that why you keep listening to my logs? Are you trying to size me up?”

Spock said nothing. 

“Jesus, you really are twelve years old. I’m not your competition, you know. You and Jim can do whatever the fuck you want.”

“I do not view you as my competition.”

Leonard released his wrist.

“You’re gonna want to give those a couple turns.”

Spock obeyed, turning his wrists in little circles while he sat on the biobed, staring straight ahead at the wall on the other side of Medbay, and finally said, 

“I had a sudden interest in your logs when I realized the feelings I also have for you, as well as Jim. Un...expected...though it may be, the emotional and physical response I experienced when listening to your voice confirmed my attraction.”

Leonard didn’t know what the fuck to do, after he dropped that bomb. He couldn’t even look at Spock anymore, so he stared down at the screen of his tricorder, as if there was anything interesting in there, and held it so hard he nearly crushed the thing in his hands. 

“Does this conclude my check up?”

“Yeah,” Leonard said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Spock push himself off of the biobed and walk straight out of Medbay, still in his undershirt. 

“What the fuck,” Leonard whispered to himself once he was gone. “What the fuck.”

-

Their little truce meant that Leonard couldn’t leave any more comments on Spock’s logs, although he was really tempted to go back through some of them and try to figure out just  _ how exactly _ Spock was experiencing feelings for him. His feelings for Jim were fucking obvious, the way he talked about him in way too much detail, included all of their interactions regardless of whether or not they were relevant, and consistently mentioned Jim’s leadership and bravery and all that. Whenever Leonard came up in Spock’s logs it was usually some throwaway line of  _ oh and Doctor McCoy saved someone’s life at the end _ . 

Bull _ shit _ Spock had feelings for him. Feelings of disgust, maybe, which had driven him to go through Leonard’s logs and leave all his little comments. 

But Leonard avoided the logs altogether, because he knew if he went back through them he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. And after Spock’s little confession during his checkup, Leonard didn’t see him for days. Even on the bridge. He just happened to disappear as soon as he walked into a room. 

He was reduced to personal comms, yet again. 

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** You left your blues in Medbay

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** I have nine others

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** You also left some unfinished business

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** I made my feelings clear

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Did you? Because I’m fuckin confused

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** Admittedly I find fewer logical reasons for my attraction to you than my attraction to Jim

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Wow, a sweet talker aren’t you

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** However I see no reason not to pursue these feelings

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Well are you planning to pursue me in a way that doesn’t include insults?

Spock didn’t respond to that one. Leonard felt an odd sort of victory. He also felt disappointed, somewhere in the back of his mind. He couldn’t figure out why, because he Did Not, with a capital D and a capital N, have feelings for Spock in return. The only reason that morning in Medbay had stuck in his mind was because their conversation had been so traumatic, and it was just by association that he thought sometimes about that knot of tension in Spock’s wrists and wondered what he was working on and wondered if it would be inappropriate to offer to work the tension out another time. 

Scratch that. It  _ would  _ be inappropriate. 

Still, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t at least a little curious, maybe in a morbid sort of way, of whether or not Spock  _ really _ was into him, and what it would be like for Spock to actually try to court him. 

-

**S’chn T’gai Spock (personal channel):** How would you prefer to be pursued?

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Good god

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** I’m not even gonna answer that

He wasn’t, because he also didn’t even know how he felt about all this noise. To be honest he still got uncomfortable and hot when he thought about Jim and Spock getting together. But he also still thought about Jim, sometimes. After an especially long day, or after one of those evenings where they sat together in the rec deck or in someone’s quarters and talked until their minds went blank, or after Jim got hurt, or sometimes for no reason at all, Leonard thought about him and felt like maybe they should try again. 

Their relationship hadn’t been bad, it just hadn’t worked. Wrong place and wrong time, was one of the things Jim said when it all fell apart, which made no sense because they had already known each other for years, and after Leonard finished the temporary post he’d been sent to on the Berlin (they were headed for a level 9 disease outbreak on a newly joined Federation planet and Leonard had volunteered before they broke up, actually) they’d go on to continue knowing each other and living on the same damn ship for years. When Leonard really thought about it, they’d had plenty of right places and right times. That line was probably just an excuse. 

And Spock, well. The sort of frustration Leonard felt for him since they met had changed, in the past few months. Because now Spock could do or say something that was easily five times as annoying and provocative, and the bastard was adept enough to know that he was being annoying and provocative and still do it on purpose, and Leonard just...didn’t feel like burning that bridge. In a way, he found it entertaining, to have someone on the ship who was unafraid to stand up to him in the way Spock did. Not that he would ever say that out loud.

Leonard spent a couple days thinking about Spock, and Spock and Jim, and the honestly terrible way Spock was attempting to romance him, and the way his face had changed when he’d massaged the sore part of his wrist during that medical checkup which Leonard had only scheduled out of revenge. 

What the hell. 

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Well I’m not going to tell you exactly how to court me

**Leonard H. McCoy (personal channel):** Figure it out for yourself if you’re so inclined. 

-

Two days later, after Leonard had started to assume that maybe Spock gave up, he showed up to Medbay in the morning, feeling rough from some ridiculous, specialty whiskey Jim had given him last night, only for Christine to give him a funny look while he trudged to his office. Maybe it was his visibly hungover appearance, which he intended to remedy with a hypo as soon as he sat down. 

When the doors to his office closed behind him, he realized that wasn’t the case. 

On his desk was a silver thermos and a very official looking paper envelope with his name written on the back in Spock’s unmistakable, perfectly balanced handwriting, every letter even. He risked opening the thermos first. It was coffee, strong and sweet with just a little bit of milk, and the smell of it made Leonard’s entire body settle down and his headache start to dull. He took a sip and opened the envelope. 

_ Jim told me about his plan to open the bottle of vintage triple-malt whiskey with you yesterday. You may appreciate this today.  _

_ I would like you to join me for dinner tomorrow, in my quarters. I will cook.  _

_ Spock _

“I’ll be damned,” Leonard muttered to himself, and collapsed into his chair to drink his coffee. He was about to go on a date with Spock. 


	6. best winter solstice ever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here it is, yall, and sooner than i thought it'd be: the grand finale
> 
> i hope everyone is doing okay this time of year. we're gonna get through this, right?

“2079,” Jim said. 

“No way in hell.” Bones held the bottle in his hands. Single malt whiskey from the 21st century, the best money could buy back then, which Jim had gotten as a gift from an Admiral the last time they were in Yorktown. He sat on the bottle for months, waiting until that part of the year when everyone got just a little bit pissy, when Bones complained about Spock more often than usual and Jim found it hard to wake up in the mornings. And then he invited Bones for a drink. 

“Will this even be safe to drink?”

“Look at the seal. This thing could survive a nuclear war.”

Bones inspected the bottle, and then shrugged, and slipped the bottle opener over the neck to break the seal. He reached under the counter for two glasses, and Jim watched his habitual movements. They had been doing this more often, not always with booze. Sometimes they drank coffee here in the mornings, early before either of them needed to go to work. Sometimes they sat down and got so carried away they forgot they’d come to the bar in the senior officers’ rec deck for a reason. 

“Those poor suckers in the 21st century,” Bones said. He poured two glasses of clear, amber colored, non-toxic-looking whiskey. 

Jim lifted his glass. “To the poor suckers of the 21st century.”

“To the poor suckers of the 23rd.” Bones smiled easily and they clinked their glasses together. 

They’d been doing this more often, and Jim would be lying if he said he didn’t feel something between them, in the air above the bar where they sat on either sides, or sometimes on the same side with their knees bumping against each other when they moved. It wasn’t just because it was that time of year when they both needed a drink. For months now, Jim felt his eyes lingering on Bones, and Bones’ voice got lower, sometimes, when they were alone, and Jim knew what this meant. He knew what came next. 

All of this had happened before, years ago. Jim remembered, distinctly, that it hadn’t worked. The problem was just that he could no longer remember  _ why  _ it hadn’t worked. 

When they spent another evening together like this one, and made each other laugh, and Bones looked at him sometimes through his eyelashes with his glass lifted up and pressing against his bottom lip, and their knees or shoulders or elbows touched for a second and sent electricity through Jim’s entire body, it seemed ridiculous to think that it hadn’t worked. 

-

The other problem was that, at the same time Jim felt like Bones was undressing him with his eyes during the evenings they spent together, his other evenings were spent across the chessboard from Spock, who seemed to be doing the same thing, in his own way. He’d let his hand linger on the table between moves, as if it was reaching towards Jim. When Jim spoke there would be this warmth in his eyes, while he listened, and sometimes Jim wondered if he was even listening at all, the way he was staring at him sometimes. 

Bones and Spock were very similar in some very key ways. Both of them were extremely passionate and stubborn, a little bit set in their views, obsessive about their work to the point where Jim sometimes had to forcibly remove one or the other and convince them to take a break, and neither were even half as subtle as they thought they were. And if only one of them had started flirting with him over the last few weeks, he could have asked the other about it. Somehow, things being what they were, it didn’t seem like a good idea at the moment.

“You getting rusty on me, Spock?”

Spock was playing bad tonight. He looked up from the way he’d been staring at the different levels of the chessboard, and as soon as they caught eyes Jim felt like he was under a microscope. 

“I may be in need of more practice,” he said. 

Nope. Not subtle at all. 

-

“This is a surprise. Captain Kirk in the lower decks after hours.”

“With the candlestick,” Jim said, and collapsed onto Scotty’s orange couch. 

“Tea or whiskey?”

Jim thought about it for a second. He knew what he should ask for, and what he wanted to ask for, and finally he rubbed his eyes and said, 

“Tea.”

Scotty had an electric kettle in his office. An old one that looked like it might have survived a couple of wars and more than a couple changes to its power source. In here it was plugged in to a personal battery with a little blinking green light. 

“Why don’t you just use a replicator?” Jim asked while the kettle hummed. 

“Yeah, I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask that.”

He breathed out a laugh and leaned back into the couch cushions. He needed to come down here more often to hang out. Scotty’s couch ruled. And there was the added bonus of tea service. 

“Cream and sugar?”

“Uh, cream, no sugar.”

“Aye.”

Tea service on fine china, too. Jim sat up to accept the dainty white teacup in his hands, and Scotty came back a second later and joined him with one of his own. Jim knew what he was going to ask first. It wasn’t like it was unusual for them to hang out, but Jim didn’t normally show up with no warning like this. He lifted his teacup up to his lips and then paused, and said, 

“So my two closest friends are both hitting on me right now.”

Scotty turned his head, and narrowed his eyes, before finally nodding. He almost looked impressed by this information. 

“Did you come here to hide from them?”

“No I’m here because--because if it was just Spock then I could talk to Bones about it and if it was just Bones I could talk to Spock about it. But it’s both of them at once. It’s like they coordinated.”

“And you think they don’t know what the other is doing,” Scotty confirmed, although Jim wasn’t sure actually. He hadn’t thought about the possibility that they could both know what’s going on. 

“I don’t know, do you think they talk?”

“If they do talk, I’m sure they’ve talked about you.”

Jim felt like a teenager, speculating about his friends talking behind his back. He drank his tea. 

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

They sat there for a moment, in silence, with the hum of the ship’s engines echoing through the room. They didn’t talk about their relationships, because Jim usually had Bones for that, and when he couldn’t talk to Bones he talked to Nyota--except Bones had announced that talking to Nyota about anything except Christine was off limits until they finally got together. Although he and Scotty spent a lot of time talking about the Enterprise, which was the same for both of them as talking about love. So it wasn’t going half bad.

“Well,” Scotty said, “I guess the question here is if there’s a clear choice already.”

“Hmm.”

“Or if you’d rather not have to choose at all.”

“Hmm?”

“But that depends on how the two of them would feel about it.”

“It does, doesn’t it.” Jim balanced his chin on top of one hand, leaning over his knees. He stared down at the floor. “That’s the part I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you already have a…” Scotty trailed off. 

Jim used the hand that was propping up his chin to cover his face instead.

“I don’t know how these things get around,” he said through his fingers, “Yeah, Bones and I were together. But that was years ago.”

“Huh. And now you run a ship together?”

“We’re adults, we got over it.”

“Sounds like at least one of you didn’t.”

Jim groaned. Scotty took that as cue to change topics. 

“Commander Spock flirts?”

“He does,” Jim said into his hands, and then lifted his head, to see Scotty staring at him. Probably waiting for an explanation. 

“He’s just been paying a lot more attention to me,” Jim started, although he tried to remember when Spock paid  _ less  _ attention and couldn’t come up with anything. “I don’t know, he--he hangs around longer. Shows up early for breakfast. We play chess. He asked me to be his training partner in the gym.”

Scotty tilted his head to the side. “And what did you say?”

“I probably made some sort of joke, but now we do hand-to-hand every week.”

Jim should have known that the whole  _ training partner _ thing was part of Spock flirting with him. Instead he played dumb and it wasn’t until the second time they practiced hand-to-hand in the gym, both of them in their bright red workout gear, and Spock pressed him into the mat with his arm pinned behind his back and whispered  _ Tap out when you are ready _ into Jim’s ear that he realized something was up. It wasn’t like that made him stop going. It just made him...confused. 

“Well has he asked you anything?”

“No, I don’t know if he will for a while,” he said, “That’s kind of how he does things. He’ll wait until it’s become impossible for either of us to misread the situation--until there’s no margin of error I guess--and then he’ll ask me out.” Jim laughed and shook his head. “By that time it’ll probably have looked like we’ve been dating for months.”

“And Bones…” he continued, even though Scotty didn’t ask, “If he was into me again I don’t think he’d ever tell me, honestly. His standards for himself are too high, he doesn’t think he deserves second chances. Like ever.”

“You know an awful lot about both of them.”

“Well I should, they’re my--” Jim’s mind blanked.  _ Best friends? Closest friends? We run a ship together?  _ None of those descriptions seemed right for some reason.

“Ah, shit.”

Scotty slapped him on the back after Jim dropped his face into his hands again. 

-

Jim needed to make a plan, he knew that. He knew a couple of other things. He wanted both of them. Because he didn’t want Spock to stop flirting with him, and he didn’t want Bones to stop sitting so close when they hung out, either, and when he thought about starting a relationship with just one of them and not the other, something didn’t feel right. 

He spent a couple of hours awake in bed thinking about every possible angle of the situation, every different way he could have the conversation he needed to have with them, how they’d react, what they might say about each other. He tried to imagine if Spock and Bones would be okay with Jim dating both of them. He came up empty. That was the question that lingered in his mind the longest, and made him decide that the conversation they needed to have needed to include all three of them at once. Jim would lay it all out, and maybe Spock’s cheeks and ears would get flushed and maybe Bones would frown in the way he did when he got cornered and was trying not to blush himself, and maybe it’d be supremely awkward, but that’s how it needed to happen. 

The decision was final, in Jim’s brain, after that night, and then after about twenty minutes into one of his early coffee dates with Bones--because that’s what they were, honestly--he took action. 

“Bones,” he said, breaking the silence of the last five minutes. Bones had been drinking his coffee on the other side of the bar, and staring out at the stars through the windows. His arms were resting on top of the counter. He was wearing that short-sleeved version of his uniform today and Jim’s eyes lingered on his forearms, just for a second, before finding his neck, and then his face, and Bones turned away from the window and looked at him. 

“I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“After the Winter Solstice party, you wanna meet up here?”

Bones actually smiled a little bit, at that. 

“Yeah,” he said. And they went back to just sitting there, for a while, until Bones broke the silence again with,

“You know, Spock was asking me about our relationship. Back then, I mean.”

Jim knew what  _ back then _ meant. He wanted to ask why Spock and Bones were suddenly talking about their past relationship, but it didn’t seem like the time. Bones looked nervous, now, biting at the side of his lower lip. 

“And I just can’t remember--” he paused, and then shifted, crossing his arms over the bar and leaning just a tiny bit closer, and lowered his voice just a tiny bit more, “did it really not work?”

Jim filed through his brain, looking for some memory from when they’d broken up. It was hard, when Bones was staring at him like that. And it was hard because even though they’d become best friends since they broke up, they’d never really talked about it again. 

“What did we say to each other when we broke up?”

“Something about not wanting it to get in the way of our lives. It was when we were first off-planet, and I had that--”

“Temporary posting on the Berlin.” Jim remembered now. He ran a hand through his hair. “I broke up with you, didn’t I.”

“You said we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I think you thought you were being merciful.”

“And then you were assigned to the Enterprise.” 

“Yep.”

“Wow. It kinda sounds stupid, in retrospect.”

“Your words, not mine,” Bones said, smiling a little, and went back to his coffee cup.

Jim used the moments of silence that followed to think about it--really think about it--breaking up with Bones after struggling to keep up their relationship when they were on different ships, months of being on his own, and then, when Bones showed up on the Enterprise, the way they immediately became friends again, without even a little bit of awkwardness. Almost as if, 

“It was pride, wasn’t it,” Jim said.

“What do you mean?”

“That we didn’t get back together after you joined the Enterprise. We broke up for stupid reasons and then when we were in a position to try again, we just didn’t want to admit we wanted to.”

“Coulda been,” Bones mumbled. He shrugged. “At this point, who knows.”

Jim looked up at the clock. He was supposed to meet Spock for breakfast this morning, since he’d canceled on their chess match they had scheduled for tonight. He downed the rest of his coffee. It was almost cold, anyway. 

“Going somewhere?”

“Yeah,” Jim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Meeting Spock for breakfast. Hey, speaking of which, my evening is free all of a sudden if you want to do something. Watch a holovid, I don’t know.”

Bones took a deep breath, like he was steeling himself for something. “Actually,” he said, “I can’t. I’m meeting Spock for dinner.”

“You’re meeting Spock for dinner?”

“Trust me, you don’t wanna know.”

With that, Jim left for the mess, feeling all at once confused, intrigued, buzzed on caffeine, a little bit sad, and, actually, a little bit horny, too. That damn short sleeve uniform.

-

“You know the senior officers’ rec deck?” Jim asked Spock over breakfast, but it was when they met for breakfast the day after, when the memory of Jim’s conversation with Bones wasn’t hanging in his head like a cloudy fog. It was also the morning of the Winter Solstice party, and Jim had no other choice but to ask him right now.

“The one where you and Leonard spend time together in the evenings,” Spock said by way of confirmation, and it felt creepy. Bones and Spock were starting to know things that they only could’ve learned from talking to each other. During the time of the year when the two of them usually fought the most and, one year, were no longer on speaking terms at all, it felt a little creepy. 

“Yeah.” Jim cleared his throat. “That one. Will you meet me there after the party tonight? I want to talk about something.”

Spock’s eyes widened just a fraction, and Jim could see his ears flushing a little bit when he tilted his head and said, “Certainly.”

“Great.”

Jim didn’t even want to go to the party anymore, at that point. He realized, through that day’s entire shift, and sitting in the mess after, and standing in the middle of a shipwide party that night, that he should have scheduled this conversation for way, way earlier. 

He didn’t even remember half of the party, just that he’d spent it as a wallflower, watching his crew come together on the dance floor and shake off all of their troubles from the past few months in space. 

-

Jim stayed behind to make sure the rec deck got cleaned up, and then cursed himself for it when he got up to the senior officers’ deck and saw that Spock and Bones were already there, waiting for him. If he’d arrived first he would’ve had some semblance of the upper hand, and instead he walked into the room and both of them turned away from the bar to look at him, and Jim got the distinct feeling that their conversation up to that point had been about him. The two of them were standing pretty close, but they separated as Jim came closer, making a space for him in the middle. They were both in their blues, which looked almost festive, tonight. Bones’ expression was loose and happy, the way he always looked at the end of a night out. Spock was himself. His eyes stayed trained on Jim since he’d walked into the room. 

Jim took a deep breath. “Look,” he said, “I know you’ve both been flirting with me lately.”

“So you’ve got eyes,” Bones interrupted. 

He smiled when Jim snapped at him, 

“Let me finish--I’ve thought about it, and I don’t like feeling like I’m supposed to choose. I’d honestly rather not. So I invited you both here to see if we can figure something out that we’re all comfortable with.”

Jim witnessed Spock and Bones exchanging a look, something he was sure he’d never witnessed before in his life. It looked almost like Spock was turning to Bones for confirmation, like he suddenly valued the other man’s opinion. 

“No, he doesn’t know. Jim, Spock has been trying to court me.”

“ _ Trying to _ implies mixed success. I do not appreciate--”

“Fine. Spock and I started dating.”

“What?” Jim asked, looked back and forth between the two of them, and then asked again for good measure, “ _ What? _ ”

Spock just nodded. When Jim looked back to Bones, he rolled his eyes. 

“How did this happen?” There was an unspoken _ first  _ at the end of Jim’s question, as in, how did Spock and Bones getting together manage to happen before Jim and Spock or Jim and Bones, either of which would have been more plausible in Jim’s mind. He had figured that if he started to date both of them, they’d learn to tolerate each other at some point, but he hadn’t considered it much further than that. Actually, this was probably the best case scenario.

“He blurted out that he was into me during a medical checkup.”

Jim looked to Spock for confirmation. That was the last way he would’ve imagined Spock coming on to someone, although he’d only ever imagined Spock coming on to him. Maybe, between the two of them, it actually made sense.

“This happened after he performed a hand massage on me in the middle of the Medical bay.”

“You gave him a  _ hand massage _ ?”

“Wrist massage,” Bones corrected, and this was not at all where Jim expected this night to go, but he was having way too much fun now. 

“Oh my god, you were flirting, Bones!”

“Shut up.”

“Was that a dinner date, yesterday?”

Bones turned red, a little bit, which meant that it definitely was. Jim would have given anything to find out how that date went. He’d have to corner one of them later to find out. 

That is, if he ever found himself alone again at all. Spock and Bones were closer, now, than when Jim had first walked up to the bar. Bones had one elbow propped up on the bar so he could lean over and talk to both of them. Spock was just sort of...staring him down. He was doing that thing where he didn’t outright reach out and touch Jim, but just positioned himself close enough that they might brush against each other by accident. 

“So,” Jim started, and he didn’t know how to finish the sentence from there. Bones smiled at him, that small private sort of smile he only ever saw when they were alone. 

“So I don’t think you need to worry about making a choice.”

Jim looked over at Spock, who nodded once in agreement. This  _ was _ the best case scenario, Jim was pretty sure. And for some reason he didn’t know what to do with himself in the middle of all of this. 

“I think I wasted a lot of time overthinking,” he said.

“I think you did.”

“Jim,” Spock said. Jim turned to look at him. He was still staring, but there was something warmer, now, in his face. Maybe _ hot _ was more like it. It made Jim’s whole body feel warm and awake. 

“I had planned something different, initially, but this appears to be my only opportunity to tell you my true feelings.”

From over his shoulder Jim could hear Bones muttering _ such a drama queen _ , before getting up to go to the replicators on the other side of the bar. Spock exhaled sharply, his version of an exasperated sigh or an eyeroll, and continued. 

“Although I lived in denial for many months, my attraction to you was immediate, and has only grown in depth since we’ve become friends. Were I to have the opportunity to know you romantically and sexually, I would cherish it.”

All Jim could think was  _ holy shit _ . He’d known this, of course. He already knew Spock was into him, but those were the words in his head,  _ into him _ . Words like  _ attraction, immediate, depth, cherish the opportunity to know you romantically _ ….well, holy shit. Yeah, he was never going to have any sort of upper hand in this conversation, not when Spock said things like that. He didn’t even know how to respond, he was pretty sure he’d just eternally have some sort of deer-in-the-headlights look on his face and never speak again. 

“Drink some water.” Bones set glasses in front of the both of them. 

“Bones,” Jim croaked. “You knew about this?”

Bones shrugged. “He didn’t give me _ that _ kind of a line.”

Jim smiled and turned back to Spock, and that heat in his eyes and in his expression only seemed to burn brighter when Jim smiled at him. 

“Oh, come here,” Jim said, and leaned forward and kissed him right on the mouth, right where all his ridiculously practiced words came from. Spock froze, for just a moment, and then kissed him back, and Jim realized they had needed to do this at least for the past three months. He realized something else. 

Bones was watching them. 

One kiss had no business being this hot. He pulled away from Spock and saw Bones staring at him, with something in his eyes that shot through Jim’s entire body, and he knew that look--he remembered when Bones used to look at him like that--he felt like he’d die if he didn’t lean over the bar towards him next. With one hand still clutched in the fabric of Spock’s uniform over his shoulder, Jim met Bones halfway over the bar and kissed him too. All at once it felt completely familiar, and Jim couldn’t believe they used to do this all the time and stopped, but it was different, too. It was something new, because they were different people than before, but also because Spock was there, and one of his hands was running down Jim’s body, his chest, his arm, the lines of the back of his hand. 

“This is the best Winter Solstice ever,” he said when Bones pulled away from the kiss, flushed and breathing hard. And he couldn’t believe that he’d said that before he watched Spock and Bones kiss each other a second later. 

_ The End.  _


End file.
